QandO

August 16, 2004

Is this a flip or a flop?
Posted by McQ

On August 11th as reported by the Washington Post, John Kerry told Nevadans that "Yooka" Mtn. was a bad deal and if he were elected he'd take care of it:

The Democratic presidential nominee said Bush is threatening the security and the economic vitality of Nevadans with his plan to ship spent nuclear waste from around the country for storage in the mountain 90 miles northwest of here.

Kerry said that if he is elected he will cancel the project, which has cost the federal government billions and eventually could cost as much as $60 billion.

"Yucca Mountain to me is a symbol of the recklessness and the arrogance for which they are willing to proceed with respect to the safety issues and concerns of the American people," Kerry said on the 12th day of his post-convention coast-to-coast swing through battleground country. "When John Kerry is president, there will be no nuclear waste at Yucca."

One assumes he's since learned how to pronounce the mountain's name, but it may explain why he apparently forgot that in 1999 he and 3 other Senators asked for the movement of nuclear waste to Yucca Mtn. be accelerated as revealed in "Human Events".

HUMAN EVENTS has obtained a March 23, 1999, letter to then-Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski (R.-Alaska), signed by Kerry, calling for the acceleration of a nuclear waste acceptance schedule.

When the letter was sent to Murkowski, the Committee was working on legislation to advance the siting and construction of Yucca Mountain -- the site designated by Congress in 1987 as the only site the Department of Energy was allowed to study as a future permanent storage repository.

The thrust of the Kerry letter is that there was an established order for shipping waste from various locations across the country, but Kerry wanted nuclear waste from decommissioned power reactors to be allowed to cut in line.

The letter states, "We request that such legislation [the Yucca bill] include an accelerated waste acceptance schedule." Apparently, John Kerry had no problem with Yucca Mountain in 1999 -- his focus was on sending nuclear waste out of Massachusetts to Yucca Mountain as quickly as possible, regardless of the staunch opposition from Nevada, including two of Sen. Kerry's fellow Democratic Senators.

I get confused in all of this ... is it a flop, a flip or a full-fledged flip-flop?

TrackBack